Thank you Troy and Adam, for your kind comments.
Troy, I looked up ‘ontological Pelagianism’ online and found this definition via Wikipedia:
If that is the sense in which you mean the term, then I can assure you that I am not a subscriber to this heresy. Like all orthodox Catholics, I believe that mankind lost its innocence in the dawn of human history and that this has blighted our earthly lives ever since. Christ’s death and resurrection purchased our freedom from original sin and through his gift of the Holy Spirit empowered us to live sinless lives. As scripture affirms, however, in our weakness we fail to avoid sin, e.g. “If we say we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves, and truth has no place in us; if we acknowledge our sins, he is trustworthy and upright, so that he will forgive us our sins and will cleanse us from all evil.” (1 John 1:8-9). During his healing sevices, Catholic evangelist Jo Dalton used to say: “We are not sinners because we sin; we sin because we are born sinners.” That I believe should be the belief of all Christians.
As an aside, the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that we derive our proneness to sin from a single pair of humans called Adam and Eve who succumbed to Satan’s temptation to be like gods and to arrogate to themselves the divine prerogative of determining good from evil. This is the essence of what I believe is an allegorical story about eating the fruit hanging from the tree of knowledge in the centre of the garden. Observing our present world, it seems clear to me that mankind continues to arrogate this prerogative and to ignore the word of God. I am of course aware of the view of many, including Dr Francis Collins expressed in his book ‘The Language of God’, that we are probably not descended from a single parent pair and that sin may have originated in a large group of the earliest humans. I have not researched whether the official Catholic position on this may be open to evolution if scientific progress makes the one-parental-pair viewpoint untenable, but St Augustine strongly advised Christians not to make themselves look foolish in the eyes of science-savvy non-Christians by irrevocably committing themselves to an interpretation of scripture which the advance of human knowledge could prove erroneous. That is sadly what YEC Christians do today, thus making themselves easy objects of ridicule by Dawkins and his allies.
Back to the main theme. Is Chrisentheism the way forward? I don’t think so. When scripture speaks of exalting Christ above all things it is speaking of created things. Christ is the supreme creature of God because he is God’s Son. The person who became incarnate in Christ was/is the second person of the Trinity possessed of the one divine nature but taking a created human nature in order to save us, and yes that unique dignity lifted him above all other creatures. But if we believe that God’s ONLY motive in creating the whole universe was to bring about the redemption in Christ of those he created in his own image in this miniscule world on the edge of one galaxy out of the billions of galaxies that evolved from God’s act of creation in the foreknowledge that they would fall from grace, that raises some very difficult questions. How can we be certain that God has not caused intelligent life to evolve in many pockets of an indescribably vast universe or be certain that he has not when needed sent his Word into those worlds to redeem the fallen? How can we know that God has not created our own world to give us a genuine choice of whether to abide by his will or to rebel, and if we had opted for the former to rejoice in their subsequent glorious life in intimacy and friendship with him. Why should we discount the scriptural texts which suggest that God’s primary purpose in creating was to glorify himself and to fashion a work of art that was very pleasing to him, that he saw as “very good” (Gen. 1:31)? How can we believe that God’s creative plan hinged on our failure to obey his will for us and would not have taken place at all if we had not fallen from grace? Are we saying that God’s creation was not so “very good” if we rebelled against him? Not many leading theologians would subscribe to the view that our sin somehow detracted from the goodness of God’s creation. It was/is very good anyway, whatever our choice may have been.
It is in my view misleading to call this a plan B. God’s purposes would work out to his glory however his creatures chose to exercise their freedom of choice. His perfect will of course was for us to submit joyfully to his all-wise guidance of our lives, but his permissive will allowed for the folly of our rebellion and envisaged an escape route for us. This wasn’t plan B, it was plan A all along.
Adam, although I am a great believer in the doctrine of the Trinity, I don’t think “that the Bible makes it quite obvious that God is 3 persons in One.” If that was true, the plethora of heresies the early Church had to deal with on this topic would not have occurred. Jesus promised his Holy Spirit to guide his disciples into “all truth”, and the development of this and many other doctrines (e.g. regarding the status of Mary) led to many heretics being excluded from the mainstream Church and the formulation of the great Athanasian and Nicene creeds.
I’m sorry if the sentence you quote gave a wrong impression of what I believe. The following is an extract from my Kindle book 'The God Debate - Dawkins in Denial: Christian guide through a atheist wilderness", first published online in 2016, which explains my position I hope with clarity:
"The Trinity
For she [Wisdom] is a reflection of the eternal light, untarnished mirror of God’s active power, and image of his goodness. (Wisdom 7:26)
"Properly understood, the Trinity is a profound and subtle concept. It has nothing to do with belief in three gods, and Dawkins’s citation of the views of Thomas Jefferson, a layman who believed neither in a personal God nor in the Trinity, will plainly shed no light on it.
"As Dawkins rightly notes, the Trinity is usually presented as three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, subsisting in one divine nature. The Son is eternally begotten by the Father, and the Spirit is breathed out between them (although Eastern Orthodox Christians see things a bit differently). The related concept of the Incarnation is also profound, the Son being incarnated in Christ, a divine person acquiring a second, human nature so as to live out a human life of total obedience to the Father’s will and thereby bring about in his own person an ultimate end to the man-made rift between ourselves and God.
"Personally, the Father-Son-Spirit credal presentation of the doctrine of the Trinity doesn’t help me relate to it very well. But John’s Gospel, borrowing from Greek philosophy, uses another image for the Second Person in the Trinity, that of Word or Logos, a perfect expression or representation of God:
"‘In the beginning was the Word: the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things came into being, not one thing came into being except through him. … The Word became flesh, he lived among us …’ (John 1:1-3; 14)
"This imagery has echoes elsewhere in the New Testament picture of Christ as the incarnate Word, e.g., both Colossians and Hebrews describe him as the visible representation or likeness of the invisible God, a first-born Son through whom all things were created.
"In Christian belief, the Trinity expresses in human language something that in its own infinite reality is inexpressible in our language and incomprehensible to our minds. It gives us an unexpected glimpse of what God’s inner life must be like, assuring us that somehow, in his infinite majesty, God is not alone, that something akin to inner relationships exist within the one divine nature.
"I have struggled during my life to find a way of expressing this mystery to myself. The nearest I have come is to think of the Word as God’s self-image, perfectly expressing the divine essence with a fullness that in human language only something like personhood could express. After all, I have a self-image, I can even talk to myself. So, can I not imagine God knowing himself, conversing with himself?
"So, what of the Spirit? In his self-contemplation, does God find satisfaction in what he sees? We experience self-love, albeit distorted by selfishness. Does not divine self-love flow from God’s self-contemplation, an outpouring, out-breathing (expiration) of pure love between Imager and Image? Could not the Spirit be a self-love so perfect that only something like personhood could express it? And could it be our final destiny to be caught up in what Catholic charismatic Miles Dempsey memorably termed “the cross-fire of divine love”?
"Interestingly in this context, Chapter Four of Fr. Spitzer’s book New Proofs offers a metaphysical proof that God, the uncaused, unconditioned reality upon which all else must depend, not only understands all reality but must be pure understanding itself. If so, must there not be a triad of relationship within God’s nature, the one understanding, the one understood, and the love relationship between them?
"Scripture and Creed assert that all creation came to be through the Word, the Second Person in the Trinity. This makes complete sense if God is pure being and if the Word, viz. God’s self-image in his divine essence, is the perfect representation of pure being. In this self-image, God sees every conceivable possibility of derivative being (a ‘multi- or mega-verse’ if you like in the divine mind), and the existence of our universe is evidence that he has decided to explore at least some of the infinite creative opportunities present within his divine nature, a supreme artist creating his masterpieces on a canvas of nothing but potentiality.
“Christians believe that Jesus is the incarnation of this divine Word, the Word made flesh (John 1:14), whose coming, so long awaited in the old Israelite covenant, is the key to our rapprochement with God.”
Although lengthy, I hope the above has added some thought-provoking ideas to the debate.
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